mac pro vs. macbook pro
June 5th, 2007 by Dylan
I had been waiting for today’s announcement of the new MacBook Pro, and after reading the specs and prices, in spite of the MacBook Pro improvements looking rather nice, I decided to go with the Mac Pro instead, and I’ll keep my first gen MacBook Pro around as well for travel. In evaluating my computer usage, I’ve been a bit dissatisfied with the performance of the MacBook Pro for a while as I can’t effectively run Parallels without running out of RAM. In fact, I’m pretty much always out of RAM with the MacBook Pro.
While I do travel rather frequently, I decided that when I’m on the road I can live with the slower computer, and when I am working, I’ll have the luxury of a quad core machine with 9 GB of RAM. It’s the first desktop machine I will have used in several years, and I’m curious to see if I can handle life with two fully capable machines.
As far as keeping the two machines in sync, the only thing I am concerned about is email as just about everything else lives in subversion or isn’t all that important. I’m a crazy power user of Thunderbird, and I have far too many email accounts. If anyone has good suggestions (besides the typical just use imap for everything, which isn’t enough given my filter settings, etc.), I’d love to hear them.
No suggestions besides using IMAP for everything (I’m back to Mail.app since it has better offline caching and for Spotlight, although I miss my keyconfig and GMailUI), but curious as to what kind of filter settings are you using that doesn’t work on the server side?
I can’t think of anything that Procmail/Maildrop can’t do (if you have mail accounts that don’t have flexible filtering, you might try getmailing to an IMAP server that does)
The main filtering obstacle I have is basically the multiple accounts into a common set of shared folders. The real issue is probably that I’ve just never done any mail sys admin work, so my knowledge is probably a bit dated for what is possible.
IMAP with SyncTogether installed. I also have a MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro, and SyncTogether was a great purchase in terms of keeping that stuff in sync. I switch pretty much seamlessly between the two computers.
Due to situations beyond my control, I still use a PC and had a similar probablem with my email. I found my answer with PortableApps (www.portableapps.com) I don’t know if anything like this exists for the Mac, because I just don’t watch that space.
I finally got over it and put everything into the cloud. I’m very, very mobile and the pros and cons of running a “real” email client finally tilted in favor of a web-based app and I found out that I’m living with it A-OK.
I ended up going the IMAP route… that, combined with sync services, does a pretty solid job. I had to change my workflow a bit with email, but now I have a nice system for email with the two machines, as well as with the iPhone.